Tuesday, December 03, 2013

Dammit, Healy, You Ignorant Slut

In his latest foreign policy piece ("Negotiating with Iran Is Better than War"), the Cato Institute's Gene Healy tells us that:

[T]here aren't a lot of great choices when it comes to preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. The Washington Post's Max Fisher runs through the unappealing menu of "four bad options": Bomb Iran, invade it, take covert action to topple the regime, or continue the status quo in the hopes that Iran will finally cry "uncle." There's "one okay option": Try to negotiate a deal. These choices essentially reduce to two: war or diplomacy.

Both Fisher and Healy leave out the sixth, best option:

  • Take notice of the fact that both the US and Israeli intelligence communities don't think that Iran has taken any steps to develop nuclear weapons in more than a decade;
  • Take notice of Iranian "supreme leader" Ayatollah Khamenei's 2006 fatwah declaring the development and use of nuclear weapons a sin against Islam and forbidding his regime to engage in said development or use;
  • Take notice of Iran's clear entitlement under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to develop nuclear power and the obligation of other NNPT signatory nations to assist them in doing so rather than trying to prevent them from doing so; and
  • Sit down, shut up, mind our own business, stop giving the Israeli government veto power over US foreign policy, and end the regime of sanctions, terrorism and saber-rattling that has been the single biggest guarantor of the mullahs' power in Iran for 30 years now.
Strike that "best option" above and replace with "only option that isn't pure stump stupidity."

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